Welcome Home
by Pie Badger
Summary: In the cold absolution of space, at the dying heart of a mechanical dream, Shadow returns to a place that once was home. But the question stands: is home where your happiness was, or where the people who care about you await your return?
1. No Strings Attached

**No String****s**** Attached**

_Just a call and an offer..._

* * *

The ARK in his memories was cold, but never dead. The pulse of the generator kept it alive— the people in the hallways, scientists and their families, the endless plink of feet on the metal, they staved off the forsaken emptiness of space. Without them there, the loneliness moved in, bringing rot along with it.

There was not much to decay in the way of the long, straight hallways, but the wiring told a different story. Beneath its shining façade, the ultramodern dream of mankind's future was dying slowly. Even with the core working its hardest, electricity feeding itself into the furthest reaches of the colony, the shadow of entropy lurked in those same veins. There was only so much time before it became a lifeless rock like the billions of others littering the vastness of space.

And yet…

It was home. For something like him, without parents to attach to or a town to claim origin, the planet itself was foreign, a chaotic jumble of people and places. It wasn't anywhere he belonged.

The panel came away obligingly into his hands, and he set it aside, turning his attention to the wires within. His eyes swept over the tangle of different colors, and then, with a soft exhalation that wasn't really a sigh, he let them slide closed. Almost immediately his other senses shifted to fill the void: the soft whir of a patrolling Beetle, its drive-based engine crackling purple in his mind's eye; power ringing through the area like the vibrations of a gong, resonating with his own energy…

Calling upon the fruits of his early training, Shadow filtered his awareness through the jumble under his fingers. While the paint on the wires was dull and flaking, the energy within formed a vivid rainbow, not only in the area that he had bared, but within the walls as well. The break was all too obvious: a long streamer of yellow energy ending in a burst that crackled away into the air and disappeared, the lightning blood of the colony itself.

Shadow's hands flared red: with effort he forced it into the same golden color as the broken wire. His inherent chaos was always much more obliging when he wanted to destroy something— it was ill-suited for repair or defense. But he didn't think too favorably of electrocuting himself in a moment's carelessness, especially not when the colony was still infested with Artificial Chaos out for his blood.

He let his mind wander while his hands worked, opening his eyes once he had the wire firmly in hand. Professor Gerald had started the Chaos project, beings modeled after mural depictions of an ancient sea god. They weren't truly machines, not really— the nanite gel that composed most of their body was organic tissue, controlled by orders from the central, mechanical brain. They were a key turning point in the early days of Project Shadow, as the evidence that the ultimate life-form they sought to create could not be mechanical. Only an organic brain, with emotions and the natural fluctuations of energy connected to it, could manage chaos energy. Without that much, the Chaos were volatile, little more than time bombs endlessly ticking down to their next berserk rampage. The Professor had wanted them scrapped, but another scientist— what was her name, Bellaci?— had insisted on keeping them, working tirelessly to create a control chip that would allow them to act as powerful sentinels to the more extreme reaches of the colony.

_And for all that work, the chips melted as soon as she wasn't there to care for them._ It had occurred to Shadow to at least try and salvage the Chaos; he'd pried the plate off one, only to stare the source of the problem in the face. Since then he'd taken to putting any he came across out of their misery, as he had with most of the other experiments in disrepair. A few lurked in stasis, their independent generators stable and vitals functioning. Those, he left alone.

The electric tape snapped neatly in his hand, the connection filtering tentatively into the darkened wire. He waited until the flow resumed in earnest before disentangling himself, setting down the tape roll to fit the panel back into place. Another Beetle paused, its optic shifting over to him as it calculated his security clearance. The numbers came out positive and it continued on its way, the gun mounted on its front shifting up and down pensively.

Shadow picked up the tape, sliding it onto his wrist and over the red arm guard attached to his glove. He imagined that he looked a bit ridiculous. Personal grooming hadn't exactly taken precedence since the Black Arm invasion— keeping the ARK stable occupied most of his time. It was a job for several dozen specialists, he'd quickly realized, not one hedgehog trained and engineered to be a soldier. Minimal patch jobs such as this one were easy enough, but the failing magnetism generators that kept the colony's atmosphere in place were completely beyond him. Nothing to do but watch them fall apart.

His ear twitched— something was flowing over the plating on the floor, an aqueous oozing that didn't go _completely_ soundless— and his features twisted in a savage grin. Good. He needed something to pulverize right now.

The Chaos paused, and something brushed tentatively at his energy. Shadow crouched, the musculature in his body coiling like a runner on a starting block. Waited.

It came around the corner almost gracefully: a body that was little more than a cone tapering up to the sleek metal head, rippling and shimmering under the flickering lights. It cleared the wall and turned in about three seconds, charged and fired a single shot in two more. In that time, Shadow sprang from his crouch into a forward roll, leaping up into the lower plate of the head with a punch that would've clicked the teeth on anything that had them.

The Chaos reeled from the force, twisted, and brought itself around to fire again.

_Too slow._

His heel dropped into its head, metal-on-metal screeching out the dying cry of a voiceless machine. The nanite simply dissolved without the mind controlling it— the head fell, caught in the ooze and sank. Shadow simply pulled his feet free, not wasting time to grimace or even acknowledge the several thousand rings' worth of nanomachine sludge now clinging to the soles of his shoes. The colony's automated systems would do away with the remains.

After everything that had happened, peacetime seemed… hollow. Gone was the uncertainty, the confused tangle of emotions and questions as gunfire and combat erupted at every turn. He'd had an all but steady flow of activity since Eggman unearthing him from Prison Island, between the ARK's doomsday program, the Metal Overlord incident, and then the Black Arms invasion. Now Doom was dead, the Doctor was in hiding, no doubt trying to recoup the vast losses his forces had sustained, and after an unsteady truce, G.U.N. wasn't trying to kill him.

It would be stupid, not to mention suicidal, to miss the presence of any of those parties. But it came back to the fundamental crunch point that a Shadow unoccupied was a Shadow who didn't know what to do. In the void left behind when amnesia and adrenaline passed out of his system, restlessness moved to fill the space.

He supposed this was probably the point at which most people took up hobbies. Which, in turn, implied first that he could afford to waste time scrapbooking or something equally pointless, and second that he would actually be able to enjoy something like that.

A jingle of computerized chimes sounded off somewhere nearby, and Shadow very nearly roundhouse kicked the nearest object. He sat there for a moment, contemplating both his raised leg and the completely innocuous ventilation shaft that would've been his target.

The sound came again, and this time, he placed it immediately. Dropping his leg, he produced his communicator and answered it, both voice and expression carefully blank.

"Hi there," Rouge's voice purred from the other end of the line. "Been a while since we talked, hasn't it?"

"What is it?"

A pause, just long enough for someone to compose their words, or maybe give the phone an incredulous look. "I could just be making sure you aren't slowly losing your mind up there."

He waited.

She didn't give in right away, but sighed, delayed the confession to make it look like she had just plucked the thought out of thin air. "So, you keeping busy up there?" It would've been a completely innocent question coming from anyone else. From Rouge, though…

"Enough." As if she didn't _know_. As if she wasn't already practically reading his damn _mind_.

"Busy enough not to have some room in your schedule?"

She knew all right. And she was playing with him. "Tell me what you want, or stop talking."

There was an audible shift, most of the velvet dropping out of her voice. "Chaos Emerald. G.U.N.'s secured one and there's a convoy trying to shift it to a base that has the fortifications to keep it. Short jaunt, warm up the muscles, break a few robots. Just like the good old days."

Shadow stopped walking. He'd started again, keeping himself moving towards the more stable, cleared areas of the ARK before he let his guard down completely. Now the instinctive _click_ and following silence could probably be heard along the phone line. "I have no association with G.U.N., and furthermore, assuming I would be at all willing, I doubt they would want to see me."

"Oh, why not? Outside help comes in all the time. You do the job, they pay you, you go your merry way. _Besides_," she purred, a smirk audible in her voice, "I've got green light on this from my superiors. As long as you're up for it, they're willing to put you on the team. One job. No strings attached."

"Did the order come from Towers?"

"It might've."

"They're that desperate?"

It wasn't so much her words that answered the question as it was the short, bitter laugh that predated them. "Right now? Most of the field agents are playing hot potato trying to keep the Chaos Emeralds out of the doctor's hands. He got on his feet a lot faster than we did."

He considered. It was a credit to Rouge's ability to read people that he was even remotely thinking about this. Looked up, around him, at the slowly dying ARK, his home crying out for him to do what he couldn't possibly hope to accomplish. He looked down at the device in his hand, transmitting nothing so much as an expectant silence.

"Where's the rendezvous point?"

* * *

**ATMR: Look at all this chapter that wasn't here before! New update/reboot of the rough idea, this time distinctly going somewhere. So Shadow's taking a trip, going to go work for the people who were shooting at him very recently! Fun times all around. **

** Reviews are much appreciated and thoughtful ones are appreciated even more! If you hated this, telling me about it will help me to make the next chapter less of a source of your revulsion.**


	2. Reboot Announcement

Hey guys! Long time no story update! _Welcome Home_ is getting a bit of a facelift. And CPR. And, uh, a lot of other things.

Suffice to say it's coming back in all of its bridgey- continuity-gap goodness. With longer chapters. So you all have that to look forward to.

I'll leave off flapping my gums for actually writing the reboot, so stay tuned!

Badger OUT!


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